Beardance Read online

  But he had dreamed he could do something for these bears, and he was the one who had turned them loose. No one else was going to try to help. It was up to him.

  Cloyd turned and started up into the forest. Inside him, he didn’t feel so alone. He was carrying the strength of three people.

  Lost Lake deserved its name. Most summers, no hikers visited Lost Lake. No human beings saw the deer and the elk come up out of the forest on the shadowy mountainside to graze the short grass around the lake, and no one saw the occasional mountain goats on the slides of scree rock across the canyon of Roell Creek. No one saw the black bears, frequent visitors to this wild basin where they could feast on the berries that grew thick along the lush and narrow canyon bottom.

  No one saw a Ute boy proceeding slowly down Roell Creek from above, from somewhere high above. No one saw how often he stopped to search with his dark eyes or to sniff the wind. No one heard how silently he moved as he picked his way through tangles of deadfall timber up to Lost Lake, and no one heard the splash of his lure again and again on the surface of the lake, or the splashing of trout as he brought them to shore.

  He gave no shout of excitement, but his heart was singing. These cutthroats were larger and fatter than any he’d caught before. They were all in a frenzy for his little metal spinner on the dome of their world. It was for a good reason they were dying, Cloyd thought, as he was cutting their heads open across their spinal cords to stop their thrashing in the grass. The meat was bright red, and it was firm. These fish were giving up their lives to keep two grizzly cubs and the hope of grizzlies alive.

  Were those cubs near enough still to smell these trout? Had they left; this basin? Were they even still alive?

  On the slope below the lake, in the trees, Cloyd left four fish each at two places a mile from one another. He could only hope that the strong scent of the fish would bring in those bears. The sun had set behind the Needles. He hurried back to his camp at the lake to fix the trout he had saved for himself.

  Late the next morning he checked where he had left the fish. At the first place, the trout were gone. He was hopeful, though he couldn’t make out tracks. Here he left three more fish.

  Still at a distance from the second site, he could hear the magpies squawking. Then he could see those black-and-white pirates at the foot of the boulder field that spilled from the peaks separating Lost Lake and Hidden Lake. He sneaked closer and closer until he had a good view. His four trout were gone. Had the magpies flown off with the fish? It didn’t seem likely. Had the cubs come as well? Coyotes maybe? Raccoons?

  Next time he wanted to see who was taking his cut-throats. He planted more fish in the dark, then went to see what he could see at first light. He hoped he wasn’t too late.

  Once again, the first batch was gone.

  The magpies were just descending on the second site, the one where the boulder field met the woods. This time he had placed the fish on a spruce that had been felled not so long before by rumbling boulders—its needles were only now beginning to yellow. It was easy to see the silvery fish against that red log.

  The birds had jostled two cutthroats to the ground in their commotion, and the third was still in place when he saw a small paw reach for it. Then he saw the blond, doglike face of the brown cub. Brownie! he thought. Now Cocoa’s face suddenly appeared. He couldn’t quite make out what was wrong, but it looked as if the cocoa cub had sprouted bristles all around the mouth.

  Then he knew. Cocoa had learned about porcupines the hard way.

  It wasn’t but a minute before a black bear appeared, a very large black bear, with its narrow face and a streak of white under its neck. Cloyd was astonished as the bear rushed the cubs and bowled them over with a swipe, growling and baring its fangs.

  The cubs scampered away faster than he would have thought possible. With the big black bear in hot pursuit, they fled along the edge of the boulders. The black bear bowled over Cocoa, who was in the rear, and bit hard. Cocoa disappeared, yelping, into the trees as the black bear hesitated, distracted by the squawking of the magpies behind. Then the big bear turned back for the fish.

  Cloyd fretted through the afternoon and the evening, but he could come up with no good answers. With that black bear around, he was going to be of no help to the cubs. Over and over, he tried to recall exactly what the cubs had looked like in the morning. They were skinny, too skinny, too weak and too small to defend themselves from animals like that black bear. And Cocoa had a snoutful of porcupine quills. Wouldn’t they keep her from eating? Both looked like they were starving.

  If only he could talk to the grizzly woman, and ask her what to do. Ursa was probably back in Montana by now. If only she knew he’d found the cubs! If only she could tell him what to do next!

  It didn’t come to him by thinking. It came to him in a dream, after he’d given up thinking and had given in to his exhaustion. At first he’d thought it was a bad dream. He was back at the Bear Dance, only this time he had fallen in the endurance dance at the very end.

  In his dream, all the growler sticks stopped as a result of his fall, and all the dancing stopped. Suddenly a huge bear appeared, motioning toward him with an eagle feather. The bear had an arrow through its neck and one in its heart. He was terrified of this bloody bear, and he couldn’t get up. Someone was saying, “It’s bad luck to fall. The Bear Dance is over.” The growler sticks remained silent, and he glanced over to the big resonating drum. The eight men who’d been chanting and making the thunder were bears also; or were they men who’d sewn the skins of bears closed around them?

  He was squinting and trying to tell whether the singers were men or bears when he woke from his dream. He reached for his water bottle. The frightful dream had awakened him. He realized he’d dreamed again of the bear that he had betrayed to Rusty the summer before, the one Rusty had killed, the one the grizzly woman had said might be his spirit helper. He remembered what this bear wanted from him. It wanted his blood and the meat from his bones.

  Cloyd drank from his water bottle. Dream-dancing, he thought, raised as much thirst as real dancing. He reached out to the little tent pocket where he kept his tiny flashlight and the bearstone, and he felt for the bearstone in the dark with his fingers.

  That’s when it came to him, what he could do, what he could try. The singers in his dream had been dressed in the skins of bears. Maybe this was a good dream in disguise.

  Hadn’t the grizzly woman said that the shamans whose spirit helpers were bears used to wear the skins of bears?

  He wasn’t a shaman, he knew that. He didn’t even have a spirit helper. The grizzly woman had said you could only dream a spirit helper, and the only spirit helper he seemed to dream wanted his life.

  He would have to keep going on his own, without a spirit helper.

  When Cloyd made his climb he found the big grizzly undisturbed. She was buried in the scree slide, in the shadows beneath the towering north face of Mt. Oso, undisturbed by scavengers or even the spoiling effects of the sun. Working tirelessly, he tore at the scree, throwing the rocks aside until she was free. In the shade of Mt. Oso, the September cold at 12,500 feet had kept her from starting to stink.

  All he had was his pocketknife. It would have to be good enough. Fortunately, it was sharp.

  He was good at skinning. He had slaughtered many of his grandmother’s sheep and goats over the years, and he always fleshed out the hides for her. She tanned them the old way, with the brains, not with battery acid like some people were using.

  This skinning was much harder. When the flesh turns cold, it isn’t so easy to separate the hide from it. He worked carefully, separating the face of the bear from her skull. Around the paws was the hardest. His knife was dulling terribly. He wished there’d been a whetstone in one of the pockets of the grizzly woman’s pack.

  But at last, after nearly a day’s work, he was done. The cubs’ mother looked hideous now, stripped of her fur, a mass of red muscles. His grandmother had told him about this,
and now he could see it was true: a bear stripped of its hide looks like a human being.

  One last task remained. With his dull knife, he had to sever her skull from her neck bones. He would need the brains.

  Covering the grizzly’s headless body with rocks, he thanked her for the gift of her skin and skull. The sun was setting as he started down the mountain with the heavy fur over his shoulder and the skull under one arm.

  It was going to take time to flesh this hide as best he could, stake it out, then tan it with the brains from the skull. He’d better get started this night. There was no telling how long the cubs would last. Were they males or females? he wondered. One of each?

  He would use the biggest of the aluminum pots and mash the brains until they made a paste. Her brains would make just the right amount for tanning her hide. His grandmother had said that it was an example of the fittingness of things: a mouse’s brain was just the right amount for tanning a mouse, and the same went for a sheep or a goat.

  Or a bear, Cloyd thought.

  With the days growing shorter and the nights longer and colder, the bears of the Weminuche Wilderness were heeding the call from within to feed all they might, to lay in fat against the time of their long sleep. The big male black bear who counted as part of his territory the wild and remote basin of Roell Creek was partial to this high, hanging canyon above all his other haunts. It was small and confining enough for him to patrol against other bears, yet large enough to provide him with more than he could eat during a month’s stay in the fattest time of the year.

  The summer’s monsoons, sweeping up from Mexico in July and August, had brought even more rain than usual to the high country, and more forage than usual. The black bear was making his rounds, gorging first on the currants and wild raspberries thick along Roell Creek, gooseberries and serviceberries too. Along the lush stream bottom he grazed on watercress, and the thick-stemmed grasses flanking the edge of the bogs he found just as delectable. Then he started working his way up the hillsides, where the forest floor offered countless rotting mushrooms.

  Still the bear was hungry, and so he kept along the paths that he followed every day. For several days now, there’d been no fish at the two places where he had found them before. But the memory of the fish was strong, and the smell of them was still promising in his memory. He included them in his rounds just in case. At the place by the creek he found no fish, only the lingering smell of fish. Nearing the second place, at the foot of the rockslide, he grew hopeful. The fish smell was strong. But there was another scent too, and it wasn’t the human scent he’d first smelled around these fish.

  This was bear scent, and it made him irritable. The black bear suspected the cubs that weren’t his kind, the grizzly cubs who had appeared in the basin without their mother. He would kill them now if he got the chance.

  The fish were there as before, five of them lying on the log, and he began to feed on them, alertly sniffing the wind. The bear scent was still here, still strong. When he was done with the last of the fish, he would look around for those cubs.

  As the black bear was starting on the third fish, a big silvertip grizzly appeared suddenly in the boulder field. The grizzly stood to its full height atop a boulder and pawed the air, then woofed threateningly.

  Cloyd spread his arms wide and high, showing the claws that weren’t his. What do I do now? he thought. The black bear had dropped the fish in his mouth, but had taken a few steps closer, squinting for a better look and growling. The hairs along its spine were standing on end, and now the black bear was standing on two legs and woofing back at him.

  What if he charges me? thought Cloyd. I have nothing to fight with. This is a big bear, this black bear, and he’s bristling up for a fight.

  “Bears are great bluffers,” he remembered Ursa saying, and so he put all his faith in the grizzly woman. If his cubs were to have a chance, he had to run off this black bear.

  He’s going to charge any second, Cloyd thought. I have to do something first.

  Cloyd sprang from the boulder and leaped onto the elk trail at the edge of the boulder field, not thirty feet away from the black bear. From all fours he stood up and made himself tall with his height and his arms. From deep in his throat he brought out a roar that surprised him, hearing it come from inside himself. For a moment he even felt ferocious, growling and displaying his grizzly claws.

  The black bear squinted for a better look and saw that this was not only a grizzly, it was one with a human face in addition to its own. The bear turned and ran from the natural superiority of the grizzly and the terrifying oddness of the two faces.

  With a look over bis shoulder, the black bear glanced back to see the grizzly in pursuit, running on two legs only. The black bear was fast and soon covered the mile down to the lip of the hanging basin where the creek spilled in waterfalls on its plunge to the valley of Vallecito Creek far below. Still in full flight, the black bear picked up the elk trail that led down the mountainside, and in an hour’s time was miles away and three thousand feet below.

  Two pairs of highly interested eyes and ears had witnessed Cloyd’s performance. It was their sense of smell that had brought the cubs to this place. Once again, they had smelled fish. But this time they had also smelled their mother.

  They edged closer. The black bear had fled, and the bear that was their mother and yet hadn’t sounded or moved like their mother saw them approaching, and took one of the fish in its mouth.

  For a long time they watched and waited, and then their hunger and their loneliness drove them close, where their mother’s scent was strong and tinged with the suggestion of death.

  Cloyd saw them coming in like puppies begging for care yet fearful of a whipping. Their round little ears were forward at one moment, then laid back on their heads the next. Brownie led and Cocoa followed with a muzzle all stuck with quills. Cloyd let them come closer, whimpering. They backed away, came closer yet, backed away again. They were so close now, he could almost reach out and touch them. Their eyes could see he wasn’t their mother, yet their noses told them he was. He held out the fish with his claw-covered hand and he began to talk to them soothingly. “C’mon Brownie, c’mon Cocoa….”

  Brownie was standing just an arm’s length away, swiping at the air with one paw.

  ‘That’s right, that’s right….”

  Cocoa’s eyes were forlorn behind the noseful of quills.

  Brownie was sitting now, but seemed reluctant to accept the fish from Cloyd’s outstretched fingers. Cloyd took the fish again by his teeth, shook it back and forth a few times, then stuck his face out with it toward the little bear’s face.

  Brownie’s eyes and Cloyd’s met as slowly, slowly, the cub brought its face close, its dark eyes locked on Cloyd’s. The fur on the cub’s muzzle was blond, almost gold. Slowly and gingerly, Brownie took the big fish.

  Cloyd spent the day with them, right there, with the cubs crawling all over him and mouthing him with their needle-sharp front teeth. Girl bears, he saw, that’s what they were. When Brownie broke the skin on his hand once, Cloyd gave her a swat the way her mother would have done and sent her tumbling. After that she didn’t bite so hard. Grizzlies had excellent memories, he was discovering. They learned everything fast.

  He liked the way they walked flat on their feet, like people. They would stand like little people to play with his hair or to box each other, with one forepaw shielding their faces and the other flailing away. They played with the button on his flannel shirt that was showing between the rawhide boot lacings that brought the bearskin together down his middle. Cocoa let him pry open her mouth; the stub of a quill was lodged in the pink of her jaw. He should pull it, along with the others, before her mouth got infected. His fingers couldn’t get a good enough grip, and she bit him. Her back teeth, he noticed, were flat for grinding, like his.

  As the sun was dropping behind the Needle Mountains in the west, he began to climb to his camp at Lost Lake. The cubs followed the bear that alm
ost always walked on two legs, that was not their mother and yet was. At the lake, they sat on their haunches and watched the bear with two faces cast something magical out onto the surface of the lake and bring in fish after fish for them. These fish were alive and needed to be subdued.

  Cloyd ate enough of the grizzly woman’s trail mix to take the edge off his hunger. Then he crawled in under the low branches on the side of a dwarf spruce thicket away from the wind. The cubs came in and curled up with him. The grizzly’s hide would be his sleeping bag this night.

  In the morning he would pull the quills from Cocoa’s face, and the one inside her mouth, with the tweezers in Ursa’s first aid kit.

  The trees sheltered him from the wind and the night air, but the cold from the ground was reaching him even through the grizzly’s thick fur. Tomorrow he would make a bed of spruce needles under a low-ceilinged overhang he’d seen among the ledges on the steep slope below the lake. Under that roof he’d stay dry if night rains came.

  He had to start living like a bear.

  The cubs tucked themselves in close as he lay on his side. They had a strong animal smell, like wet dogs, only muskier. His body warmed as it gained heat from the bears. The fast beating of Cocoa’s heart slowed as the cub fell asleep, and then it came loud and soothing like the beating of a drum.

  The wind rustled the branches of the dwarf spruce, and before long there was thunder crashing over the peaks. It rained, and it rained hard. He should have found a better place to bed down, but if he tried to move the cubs in the storm, he might become separated from them.

  The hide was thick, but the rain ran in under the dwarf spruces and found his head, his neck, his legs. The searing white bolts were striking the peaks directly above the lake now, and the thunder was rumbling the ground underneath him. The cubs slept through the storm, but it scared him to be alone and so far away from the farm. What would he do tomorrow, and the next day?